Tuesday, January 1, 2019

YOU BETTA WRITE!

Happy New Year!! I hope you all had a safe and fun one! Let's get this year started "WRITE!"

Speaking of writing, my new poetry book, You Betta WRITE!, is coming out at the end of January! I'm so excited about this project because, in addition to my signature free verse, and my recently included haiku work, it will feature a new element of poetry that I haven't added to my books before now: Shakespearean sonnets! They were written in 2014, during a sonnet challenge posed by a good friend who is also a poet.

Now that the release date is so close, I'm taking pre-orders, and I would love to have you all on board to get your copies hot off the press! Below is the pre-order link; but first, here's the back-cover summary, so you can get a feel for the book's theme:

Adverse change in social climate often warrants a shift in tone when addressing it—one with a higher decibel than before. The level of anguish and overall chaos in our world has taken its toll on many. In You Betta WRITE!, Charlene E. Green gives readers a deeper, grittier poetic look at the challenges we've faced in recent years, using free verse, haiku, and sonnet to paint her picture of inspiration, justice, and resolution.

In "The Suffering," she boldly declares that we've "got hella PhDs in the suffering of others, but ... some of us still don't have a degree of comprehension about how to master our own." In "Accident Forgiveness," she shakes the abused awake by asking how many more "fist-on collisions with your face will it take for you to finally admit that this man is not accident prone, he is purposely reckless with your life?" "Curfew" is a heart-wrenching, parent-focused narrative about the more than 200 missing Nigerian girls, at the hands of Boko Haram. But since Charlene's work is never complete without the inclusion of wit, love, and fantasy, you can be assured of just the right amount of gentle to balance out her firm voice.

You Betta WRITE! is for the grown and mature, and for those whose lives are ready for a deep cleaning, upgraded perspective, and new direction.

For those of you who haven't read or heard any of my work, I invite you to check out my blog a little further; many of the poems that will be in the book are housed here (until the release, and then they'll come down), so you can get a glimpse into the project.